On Stage
GREEN, HARRIS
On Stage sour notes BY HARRIS GREEN Musical ocmedy never possessed the golden virtues claimed for it by middlebrow reviewers who burbled stuff about Oklahoma! being "our Magic Flute." But at its...
...When all 10 pooled their deficiencies in a number ominously entitled "Tomorrow Will Be the Same," they sounded like the Battle of Britain...
...What I will remember— with great pleasure—is Prince's highly polished production, with Boris Aronson's starkly handsome, multileveled set, and a good, lively cast headed by Elaine Stritch and Barbara Barrie (of all people...
...Since that dubious and nebulous quality has by now acquired a quasi-mystical aura, and since the Broadway musical can be a gold mine when it suceeds, it was only a matter of time before subjects even more unlikely than juvenile delinquency were set to music...
...Dean Jones, a Disney leading man as well as a television star, is so lost amid the swirl of the personable cast of Company that it becomes an embarrassment when he must brag about his "charisma...
...Michael Bennett's choreography, of necessity, goes in for parody to cover the dancers' limitations...
...Rock was bound to be seized upon by a theater that already confuses amplified din with singing, repetition with invention, and mere energy with genuine liveliness...
...for good measure he had the girls shriek with glee at every opportunity, on or off stage...
...That the chance to introduce Brecht and Weill's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny to New York, after a 40-year delay, should fall to him was almost like something out of a Brecht-Weill collaboration...
...Had I left earlier, I would have been spared the glum spectacle of Man laying aside his Wall Street Journal to plod through a ballad, backed incongruously by that weird sextet...
...Naturally, Capalbo hit upon the bright idea of putting a rock group in full cry in the Anderson balcony...
...In the best New York fashion, Robert and company are never at a loss for a quip...
...Everything, apparently, but ability...
...Bernstein did, in West Side Story...
...Mozart, in Figaro, presented love's effect in all stages upon characters of all ages...
...May be...
...Instead he is a wickedly clever parodist of whatever style best suits a particular moment in the life of Robert, a middle-aged bachelor on the loose in New York with plenty of cash, three girl friends and five married couples— whose examples may do much to keep him single...
...The results have been so grim that I almost yearn for the halcyon days of Oscar Hammerstein II, who only told us a fella needs a girl so he'll never walk alone as he climbs every mountain while whistling a happy tune...
...There is plenty of performing talent on Broadway, as in the other arts...
...Of me...
...I don't think I will welcome a revival of Company...
...In fine form throughout as a lyricist, Sondheim is rarely himself as a composer...
...Given a subject of operatic intensity, he cannot match it in music...
...Forever part...
...a little of it goes a long way with me...
...Musicals have always been limited because the composers were limited, even when treating their essential subject, love...
...Here, it came at me in a lumbering translation by Arnold Weinstein ("there is no greater crime than to be without money...
...It required the services of just 10 performers— six hideously amplified rock musicians sounding all the more odd for having a flute and a French hom in their midst, and four actors who couldn't sing, either...
...Gus Schirmer's direction of The Boy Friend, Sandy Wilson's 1954 London hit, proved another brutal-ization in the name of what today passes for showmanship...
...In its day, Story was cited for what we now call "relevance...
...I felt I was hearing a dirge for musical comedy...
...While I couldn't agree more with Brecht's view of civilization and its discontents—our President would call him a "strict destructionist judge of society"—T find the message of Mahagonny (it's a crime to be broke) more truism than Truth...
...Weill could quote Zauberflote in Mahagonny without ceasing to be Weill...
...It is creators we lack...
...Weill's score endured conductor Samuel Matlovsky's assault and battery, but took its revenge on the vocal chords of Estelle Parsons, who sounded like a laryngitic banshee, and Frank Poretta, who appeared so agonized that his execution in Act III seemed more a mercy killing...
...Some flashes of wit are so bright, as when marriage is summed up as "neighbors you annoy together, children you destroy together," that one may be dazzled into believing one has been told much about the topics Company has been hailed for discussing so boldly: marriage, New York, middle age...
...Wherever she...
...Under better conditions, I hope to savor again the giddy silliness of his music and lyrics ("In our attic, we'll be ecstatic...
...At the end of Act I, when I fled into the night, they were into a family quarrel...
...Both shows had to go to more popular, less demanding media for a box-office attraction and, as a result, each has a void at its vital center...
...She should have turned the whole dreary crew out onto Second Avenue...
...Four shows that opened last month—Park, Ma-hagonny (not a musical, its fans will say), The Boy Friend, and Company—reveal how this pleasant form and those who work in it are suffering from increasing pretension, declining charm, constricting costs, and diluted artistry...
...She should have had her part, too...
...John Simon assures me the Brecht style makes a world of difference...
...Both shows are also, in whole or in part, parodies—a rewarding form, yet hardly a substitute for creativity...
...The play, a delightful but fragile salute to the Noel Coward-ly musicals of the '20s, requires a light, discerning touch...
...Despite this simple-minded formula staging of a unique work, the production has less in common with Mahagonny than with Harold Prince's Company...
...They form the entire cast, by the way, and do ail the dancing...
...Elizabeth...
...By never starting to sound like himself, Sondheim embodies musical comedy's own identity crisis: being neither opera nor the lesser art it should be content to be...
...What I forgot, almost immediately, was Stephen Sondheim's music...
...Park, a speedy flop, was of interest solely as an instance of the musical succumbing to inflated costs as well as inflated intent...
...so, obviously, they were related all along, and Young Man had selected this unlikely rendezvous to bridge a familial generation gap...
...The Boy Friend's Sandy Duncan stole the show, the reviews and the awards from La Carne...
...I still cringe at the thought of Story's ballet-boy delinquents spoiling for a rumble after spending all that time at the harre...
...The four noncommunicants— Young Man, Young Woman, Man, Woman—meet in a park and, at the suggestion of Young Man, who insists no one give his name, they try to get through to one another with conversation as inane as it is improbable and songs as leaden as they are forgettable...
...The very /tovc.'-ness of rock rhythms assured their use by a producer as artistically muddled as Mahagon-ny's Carmen Capalbo...
...Lotte Lenya, exercising her authority as a composer's widow, finally had them evicted...
...I must add that I speak as no admirer of the Brecht-Weill teamwork...
...The traits they share are none too encouraging for Broadway...
...But at its unpretentious best, it offered high spirits, affecting sentiment and charming melodies...
...Were he able to do so, the woefully undertrained voices in musical comedy could not manage it, nor could the essentially light-hearted form contain it...
...In addition, Elaine Stritch is so powerful while performing "The Ladies Who Lunch" (about how idle rich women pass the day), and the lyrics are so sharp ("a thousand dollars...
...Wagner, in Tristan, could recreate its destructive intensity...
...But who will put money into a show starring a girl who is merely talented, if no one but a few theatergoers have heard of her...
...Schirmer goosed it into a frenzy, acting on the old "keep 'em moving" principle...
...The creators of Park, Paul Cherry and Lance Mulcahy, tried to ornament that frayed new theme of bourgeois seriousness, The Failure to Communicate, with a rock beat...
...Judy Carne, so radiant doing her 43-second bits on Laugh-In, spreads a sour reek of amateurishness through the Ambassador Theater at her every entrance in The Boy Friend...
...The music is operatic in its demands, as Capalbo's mob of yowling miscasts demonstrated, but not in its rewards...
...Is the dancer on the way out, too...
...Barbara Harris faked her way through as Jenny, purring like a pussy cat in this tigress role...
...Although a more technically accomplished composer than most in the field (he can do his own orchestration), he is not a whit more inspired...
...I don't object to it in The Boy Friend—Wilson set out to do precisely what he accomplished...
...a piece of Mahler's"), that this high point has passed before one realizes there was no melody to match its brilliance...
...Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Lowe, Porter, and Berlin were not quite up to those standards but, fortunately, they never tried to be...
...It's also presented with no little contrivance, which Capalbo's alternately drab and flashy direction failed to offset...
...You can approximate Mul-cahy's cinder-block melody simply by speaking the lyric as I have punctuated it: "Elizabeth...
...What's in a "name...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 11
